Month: April 2019

The boss of Boeing has denied accusations that its two 737 Max aircraft involved in fatal crashes lacked an optional safety feature, which might have alerted the pilots to technical malfunctions that partly caused the accidents. “We don’t make safety features optional,” Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing’s chairman and chief executive, said at the company’s annual meeting…

Two Italian experts are set to perform a DNA test on a lock of hair that they say might have belonged to Leonardo da Vinci. The hair strand was found in a private collection in the US and will go on display for the first time at the Ideale Leonardo da Vinci museum in Vinci…

Facebook may eventually have more dead users than living ones. If Facebook continues to grow at its current rate, the site could have 4.9 billion deceased members by 2100, according to a study by Oxford researchers. Even if growth had stopped entirely last year, the study finds, Facebook would be looking at about 1.4 billion…

As marijuana goes mainstream, there is a persistent belief that it’s not addictive. That is in part because addictive behavior emerges more slowly than with substances such as opioids – and cannabis withdrawal isn’t the living hell of getting off those drugs. But the truth of the matter is clear: “There is no debate that…

The Canadian government blocked a visit by Carles Puigdemont days before the former Catalan president was to travel to the country at the invitation of a group advocating Quebec independence, his lawyer said on Monday. Puigdemont had been scheduled to speak in Quebec earlier this month on his experiences as a leader of the Catalonian…

There are conflicting reports as to whether a planned three-day concert to mark the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock festival has been cancelled or not. Woodstock 50 was scheduled to take place on 16 to 18 August in Watkins Glen in upstate New York state with a lineup including the rapper Jay-Z, the singer Miley…

Just when you think you’ve got the measure of Leonardo da Vinci – painter, anatomist, pioneer of flight, animal-rights prophet – he turns out to have one more talent up his sleeve. On the 500th anniversary of his death on 2 May, art historian Martin Kemp has collaborated with early music singers I Fagiolini to…

The hunt for octopus begins soon after we arrive in Sagres, in the western Algarve. Within minutes we find it at Restaurante Gigi, where tender chunks are served in olive oil and garlic, and garnished with sweet potato. The craving for Portuguese soul food sated for now, we wander down Sagres’s main drag of low-slung…

A federal government campaign to vaccinate more than 40 million children under five against polio in Pakistan has been suspended following a series of attacks on workers and police over the past week. On 23 April a police officer responsible for protecting polio workers was gunned down in Bannu. The same day, a polio worker…

German police have said they are bracing themselves for violent protests in the capital on 1 May, a traditional day for leftwing demonstrations. As many as 20,000 activists are expected to concentrate their protests on the eastern district of Friedrichshain, railing against the spread of gentrification in the part of Berlin where the majority of…